Before you get your hands on the game, we had Animation Director Billy Harper and Marketing Director Ken Schramm pack their bags for a whirlwind three-day tour spanning 5,668 miles, two coasts, three cities, and over 20 interviews with press from North America and beyond. It was an amazing couple of days of sharing the latest adventure in the inFAMOUS universe.

We have been pretty quiet about Festival of Blood since we teased you with a clip revealing Bloody Mary at PAX. Since then we have been hard at work crafting this next adventure, adding in all the final details and finishing touches on this standalone game to make the perfect purchase right in time for Halloween. This press tour allowed us to pull the curtain back and give one big preview before the game comes out next week. Billy and Ken covered tons of the new features in Festival of Blood, some of which we will cover here.

With a totally new story in Festival of Blood, of course we had to give Cole a totally new set of powers. One power that fans have always wanted in an inFAMOUS game has been the ability to fly, and with Festival of Blood we thought it was time to give Cole the chance to spread his wings. Bat wings, that is, with a new power called Shadow Swarm. While Shadow Swarm allows you to experience New Marais in a whole new way, it does come at the expense of the innocent people walking around in the night as you must feed upon them to fuel your flight.

Speaking of Pyre Night, all of New Marais celebrates this hallowed night by shrouding the entire city with banners, fireworks, and pedestrians dressing up in the streets. The look of the Pyre Night comes from Sucker Punch’s City Team spending the summer dreaming up the spooky street party that features surprises around every corner. The abandoned subway lines of New Marais have been converted to macabre underground catacombs. Stepping into these dark corridors would leave anyone unsettled, even more so when you find out that Bloody Mary’s minions have been crawling around inside them for years.

User-generated content (UGC) is a key part of the inFAMOUS universe, as you can see from our Cole’s Missing Mission Contest (the grand prize winner receives a $1,000 PlayStation Store gift card!), and we haven’t forgotten this feature with Festival of Blood. Over the last couple of months we have been listening to your feedback and playing all the missions we can from the community and the one thing we have been seeing is the desire to create strong narrative missions. To help users tell their stories, we are happy to add the new 2D cutscene tool with Festival of Blood that allows you to create comic book-inspired cutscenes in your missions. You now can create intro sequences, provide key story details mid-mission, or end your mission with a bang. Along with the 2D cutscene Tool, Festival of Blood brings a whole new set of gory assets to the UGC universe and you can now design missions with as many fiends and harpies as you want.

If you haven’t had a chance, read some of the previews we have listed below:

Now that’s a really cool game to bring out in October. I am glad they announced when this game will be released. I pre-ordered it a few weeks ago. Looks AWESOME and so does the Dynamic Theme it comes with.

Had this pre-ordered since the first day I could, I was excited when this was announced, can’t wait to play it! Wonder how long it is? Hopefully its at least a few hours, I don’t expect it to be Infamous 2 long, but hopefully its at least 5 hours if not more. The theme for this is awesome btw, definitely gives off the halloween mood whenever I turn on my ps3.

“inFAMOUS: Festival of Blood will be available on the PlayStation Store in just a couple days: Tuesday, October 25th in North America for $9.99, and $7.99 for PlayStation Plus members (and for those who pre-ordered). Play it with the classic DualShock or try it out with PlayStation Move support!”

The above statement, as seen on the main page of the psblog, is logically the same as saying that the game will be out on tuesday (in NA) for $10, and also available on tuesday for $7.99 for Plus members and for $7.99 for those that pre-ordered it but are not plus members.

This is misleading of course, as the game is probably ten dollars to non plus members who preorder the game.

I’m not interested in the main inFamous 2 game, and certainly not Festival of Blood, but I’m interested in creating and playing my own levels, and levels others have made with the UGC tools. Could you release the UGC tools as a downloadable stand-alone with no main story attached? It would just allow people to create, play, and share their own levels, and play levels created by others, and of course benefit from any UGC updates. Thanks for your time!

It would be awesome! I’m itching to get my hands on Festival of blood. Unfortunately I’m pretty sure we wont see any midnight release. We probably wont see it till they update the store on Tuesday and that probably wont happen till late in the day. Regarding the patch, I don’t think they have released a date. Collin Moore just said shortly.

I preordered this game and I’m so excited. I just love the dynamic theme that came with a pre order. this game looks so freaking awesome.it’s a shame I haven’t played infamous 2 yet but I have played the first 1 and loved it. the games not yet but I can definitely tell this is a whole new dimension in the infamous universe. can’t wait to play. Happy Halloween!!!!!! (+_+)

Hi, I realize this is a standalone game and you do not need to have Infamous 1 or 2. However, from a story and gameplay standpoint, should I play Infamous 2 before playing Festival of Blood ? Will this Festival game spoil the story of Infamous 2, or give away any secrets of New Marais or anything like that ?
I’ve played Infamous 1, but haven’t gotten to play Infamous 2 yet…. I pre-ordered FOB, just wondering if I should wait to play it, to follow the storyline chronologically….. ???